he advance of culture, to all tendencies and victories of historical
life.

This opposition of the personal interest of the upper classes to the
progress of culture in the nation produces the great and inevitable
immorality of the upper classes. It is a life whose daily requirements
you only need picture to yourselves in order to feel the deep decline
of character to which it must lead. To be obliged daily to take an
attitude of opposition to everything great and good, to bewail its
success, to rejoice at its failures, to check its further progress, to
make futile or to curse the progress which has already been made, is
like a continual existence in the enemy's country; and this enemy is
the moral fellowship of the whole country in which you live, for which
all true morality urges support. It is a continual existence, I say,
in an enemy's country. This enemy is your own people, who must be
looked upon and treated as an enemy, and this hostility must, at least
in the long run, be craftily concealed and more or less artfully
veiled.

From this arises the necessity either of doing what is against the
voice of your own conscience, or of stifling this voice from the force
of custom in order not to be annoyed by it, or, finally, of never
knowing this voice, never knowing anything better or having anything
better than the religion of your own advantage.

This life, Gentlemen, therefore leads necessarily to a complete lack
of appreciation and a contempt for all ideal efforts, to a pitying
smile when the great word "ideal" is even mentioned; to a deep lack of
appreciation and of sympathy for everything beautiful and great; to a
complete transformation of all moral elements in us into the one
passion of selfish opportunism and the pursuit of pleasure.

This conflict between personal interest and the cultural development
of the nation is, fortunately, not to be found in the lower classes of
society.

In the lower classes, to be sure, there is, unfortunately, selfishness
enough, much more than there should be; but this selfishness, if it
exists, is the fault of individuals and not the inevitable fault of
the class.

Even a very slight instinct tells the members of the lower classes
that, so far as each one of them depends merely upon himself and
merely thinks of himself, he can hope for no considerable improvement
of his situation; but so far as the lower classes of society aim at
the improvement of their condition as a cla